NBER：气候两极分化与绿色投资.pdf

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Climate Polarization and Green Investment

Anders Anderson and David T. Robinson

intense heat wave of 2018, respondents in regions dominated by a right-wing, anti-climate party

grow less concerned about climate change, while respondents outside these regions grow more

concerned. Those growing more concerned rebalance their retirement portfolios toward climate-

friendly mutual funds; those growing less concerned rebalance out of these funds, but to a smaller

degree. Financial sophistication and inertia interacts with political polarization in driving these

effects.

Anders Anderson

Stockholm School of Economics

Drottninggatan 98

Stockholm, Sweden

and NBER

davidr@duke.edu

1 Introduction

When faced with a range of disparate facts potentially open to interpretation, experi-

mental evidence shows that individuals asymmetrically update their beliefs. They attach

change attach more weight to unexpected good news about climate change and tend to

dismiss unexpected bad news about climate change, while respondents who are already

convinced of climate change attach more weight to unexpected bad news and dismiss

unexpected good news.

change affects investment choices that people make. Specifically, by connecting survey

evidence on climate beliefs with Swedish administrative records on retirement savings

allocations, we show that asymmetric updating rooted in disparate beliefs about climate

change impacts households’ allocations to fossil fuel exclusion funds in their retirement

households’ views towards the importance of climate change, as we show below. In

addition, while most Swedish households are concerned about the environment, anti-

environmental political polarization is an important force shaping public opinion in Swedish

(2005), Andreoni and Mylovanov (2012), Baliga, Hanany, and Klibanoff (2013), Glaeser and Sunstein (2014),

and other papers.

polarization affects climate beliefs and plays out along gender lines: SD voters are four-

teen times more likely to deny anthropogenic climate change than voters for Sweden’s

biggest party, the Social Democrats. Around 70% of SD voters are men. SD votes are

especially high among middle-aged, lower-income, less-educated, blue-collar men living

in areas with higher rates of unemployment.

that make it well suited for studying how household preferences are reflected in invest-

ment behavior. The system serves the entire working population of Sweden and has

over $200 billion of assets under management, placing it among the top twenty pension

funds in the world. ESG mutual funds play an important role in the system—indeed,

for households to identify funds that satisfy fossil-fuel exclusions or other ESG-related

restrictions.

households. For this, we construct a nationally representative panel of Swedish house-

holds that we survey in 2018 and 2019. In each survey, we ask respondents to state how

likely they think extreme increases in global average temperatures will be. In between

the two surveys, Sweden experienced the most extreme heatwave in recorded history,

lations (“The Green Deal”) in the European Parliament. Out of the 222 times the Sweden Democrats voted,

surveys. About half of survey respondents changed their opinion about the speed of

global warming in one way or another. For some, the extreme weather conditions acted

as a wake-up call, causing them to believe that extreme climate change is now more likely

than they previously thought. This effect is stronger for people living in areas with more

exposure to the heat wave. Yet a substantial fraction of respondents revise their views in

the opposite direction: after the heat wave they report that they think one-degree global

and they are more likely to live in districts with a higher fraction of Sweden Democrat

votes. In view of the widespread national media coverage that the heat wave received,

global warming; they say they can already see its effects in Sweden; they believe the

government should do more to fight climate change. Climate concerns and the call for

government action are both less pronounced for respondents living in areas that received

high voter turnout for the Sweden Democrats. These results extend the experimental

findings discussed above.

ings. For this we link our survey responses to retirement savings data to see how climate

lations regarding European Parliament’s “Green Deal”. Out of the 222 times the Sweden Democrats voted,

69% of the votes were against these green legislation (Hirschberg and Hallgren (2023)).